Abstract
Let us recall the principle of non synchronicity that links McLuhan, Deleuze and Bergson: Our experience is increasingly structured by organic formations and resonant intervals, while our concepts remain the unidimensional and fragmentary residues of the mechanical world. In a 1964 conversation recorded with his friend Glenn Gould, McLuhan, like Deleuze, presents this untimeliness as a problem of planes and dimensions: ‘We now live in three dimensions, he explains to Gould, even if we continue to think on single planes.’1
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Notes
Glenn Gould, ‘The Medium and the Message: An Encounter with Marshall McLuhan’, in John P.L. Roberts (ed.), The Art of Glenn Gould, Toronto: Malcom Lester Books, 1999, p. 246.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, New York: Fordham University Press, 2007.
For a good overview of the history of sound aesthetics in the twentieth century see Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999.
Susan Sontag, ‘The Basic Unit of Contemporary Art Is Not the Idea, but the Analysis of and Extension of Sensations’, in Gerald Emmanuel Stearn (ed.), McLuhan: Hot and Cool, New York: Signet Books, 1967, pp. 249–58.
On Wagner’s efforts to tame noise and distraction see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999, 247ff.
Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, 207 ff.
Walter Murch, Foreword to Michel Chion, AudioVision: Sound on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
See Fredric Jameson, ‘Totality as Conspiracy’, in The Geo-Political Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, London: British Film Institute, 1992.
For a lucid discussion of these points see ‘Marshall McLuhan: A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media’, in Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (eds), The Essential McLuhan, Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1995, 233–69
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, London: Grafton Books, 1927, p. 35.
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1911
Michel Chion, Audio Vision: Sound on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
The nature of color can also illustrate how the perceptual qualities of differential elements work. Two colors, such as blue and yellow, can be perceived as distinct and separate. But they can also reach a point of indiscernibility where they participate together to produce the color green. Green is not a sensation on its own. It is the result of a set of differential relations among smaller genetic elements. The same principle is at work when we hear a background murmur which throws up a multitude of signals that fade back and rise up as something altogether different. For an excellent analysis of these points, see Daniel W. Smith, ‘Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality’, in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader, New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 29–58.
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© 2013 Stephen Crocker
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Crocker, S. (2013). Sounds Complicated: Audition as ‘Three-Dimensional Thought’. In: Bergson and the Metaphysics of Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324504_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137324504_4
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